On Fri, 5 Dec 2014, Olav Vitters wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 05, 2014 at 02:54:09PM +0200, Vlad wrote:
>> I would propose that we do not waste any time with GDM, GNOME or
>> anything else that has sprung out of that irresponsible organizations
>> other than gtk.
>
> There's so much hate going on in within Devuan, it is rather ridiculous.
> This is a public mailing list!

I'm not affiliated with Devuan in any way, but it's not clear to me that the
views on this list are in any way endorsed by the folks doing the actual work.
But it would certainly be nice if a little bit less childishness issued forth
from, well, a lot of people.

> To nobody in specific: If there are needs with concrete technical
> solutions and a willingness to commit, feel free to have a discussion
> with either release-team@??? or on desktop-devel-list@???.

I don't mean to dress anybody in specific down here, but there seems to be
considerable political will behind introducing and *not later breaking* the
dependency on systemd-logind. The history here speaks for itself; several
major distributions have already switched from a traditional init to systemd,
entailing changes to everything from startup scripts to tmux to anything at all
using the cgroup interface directly, in order to support GNOME.

> You can also choose to continue with hate, assuming the worst from
> anyone and assume it's just a case of packaging things differently while
> demand work to "happen".

You're ascribing the words of a vocal few to the project as a whole. Then
you're making a likely-false assumption about their beliefs. (Yes, I know
that systemd solves real problems relating to isolation of user sessions
and daemon processes and that some of that is important to you guys.
That's not a great reason for GNOME's requirements to impose on systems
that do not run GNOME.)

> Devuan is very young so there's a lot of leeway. Concretely: this is an
> open email that GNOME is totally ok with technical discussions. I do
> assume it'll be with people who did a proper analysis and without the
> hate.
>
> Note: Willingness to commit I mean that if there's work to be done, the
> proposer ensures it'll get done plus takes responsibility for
> maintenance.

This is a political problem, though, and it's on your end. I think you
know the story. You guys introduced a dependency on systemd. You guys
made it mandatory. And since systemd's documentation isn't that great and
it's at least a little bit of a moving target, your dependency forced a
lot of distributions to either engage in a considerable amount of extra
maintenance work or drop support for other init systems. So they dropped
support for other init systems.

Your decision to depend on systemd affected, as described above, a whole bunch
of users who don't even use GNOME or X11 or any of that other stuff. That's why
people are up in arms, and that's why you see people ranting, sometimes
childishly, about GNOME and systemd. That's why this discussion is so
politically charged---because it is at its very core political. And that's why
I don't think coming hat-in-hand, as you've done, looking for help with GNOME
is going to be interpreted as anything better than racketeering by quite a lot
of people.

What's a technical discussion going to solve here? A technical discussion
would necessarily centre around hacks and workarounds for the symptoms of
the underlying political problem.